Berlin’s Monokulti
If you live in Berlin or were even planning to, you’ll be aware that the city is a veritable melting pot of cultures, a modern day Alexandria. Or so you keep hearing. Kotbusser Tor is a delta into which many a meandering and permanently plastered Erasmus student has converged. It is not the Nile, but they’re certainly in denial. You see, Kreuzberg is multikulti, if your idea of a transcultural encounter consists of purchasing a falafel from a Turkish joint at 4 am before moving on to the next clandestine bar. Here, of course, you will hobnob with other fearless intercultural explorers, with whom you share a passion for fried chickpeas, cheap beer and other less legal substances. And they will most certainly be white. Berliners like to picture themselves as extras in a Benetton advert, whereas in reality the city has the ethnic diversity of an Al Jolson concert. But refrain from saying this aloud, mentioning the city glaring lack of different skin tones will not get you many Frühstück invitations. Contrary to what you might think, pointing out the Emperor’s lack of clothes will not cast you as the innocent lonely voice, perilously floating on a sycophantic sea. Instead you’ll get the look normally reserved for Swabian real estate speculators.
But enough with tortured analogies, let’s return to overstretched definitions, like the semantic content of this Berlin mantra. What is “multikulti” exactly? And why does it differ so significantly from its English equivalent? According to the Oxford Dictionary of Politics, “The term ‘multiculturalism’ emerged in the 1960s in Anglophone countries in relation to the cultural needs of non-European migrants. It now means the political accommodation by the state and/or a dominant group of all minority cultures defined first and foremost by reference to race or ethnicity; and more controversially, by reference to nationality, aboriginality, or religion, the latter being groups that tend to make larger claims and so tend to resist having their claims reduced to those of immigrants”.
Call me a pedant if you like, but labelling Berlin “multikulti” just because it contains an unusually high number of Swedish graphic designers and Chilean DJs strikes me as a tad inaccurate. And please correct me if I’m wrong, but I seldom meet someone of Turkish descent not manning a deep fryer. I have no intention of discussing the merits ,or lack thereof, of cultural pluralism, neither is this a contribution to the assimilation debate. And yes, Berlin does contain a visible smattering of individuals that hail from other continents with higher concentrations of melanin in their skin, but these are not usually the main actors in Berlin’s much trumpeted multiculturalism play, full of sound and fury but little else. Amongst the ensemble we encounter Scandinavian art students, interning Iberian architects, Icelandic illustrators, French Erasmus students, Midwestern fashion designers, Estonian bloggers, English TEFL teachers, Australian backpackers, and Polish programers, all of whom enthusiastically take part in this self-proclaimed cultural cornucopia. A pluralism that boils down to bar hopping around Kreuzkölln, drinking cheap beer on public transport and in parks, demonstrably slouching in squatter chic cafés or scouting flea markets for the holy grail of vintage. All while waxing lyrical to new, wide-eyed Ryanair arrivals, about the truly diverse scene, home to a plethora of different lifestyles. Some might start viewing this constant reminder of Berlin’s status as a hotbed of cultural interactions and encounters (it is full of Erasmus students after all) with suspicion, as a symptom of a barely disguised inferiority complex.
But let’s view it in a positive light. With the worrying rise of the extreme right in Europe and many pronouncing multiculturalism as a failed social experiment, it is reassuring to know that MacBooks and street art can unite so many people. So let’s hail Berlin’s monokulti, because frankly there’s no escaping it. Originating in Mitte and moving to Prenzlauer Berg, it is an unstoppable mono culture that keeps expanding, always in search of a non-gentrified host in which it can propagate, colonising Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain and spreading to Wedding and Moabit. Like a huge petri dish in which identical scarf wearing non-comformists are cultivated. I should know, I myself am part of this micro-cosmos.
Berlin Related Books
In my blog I often poke fun at my current host city, which I would also do if I were still back in London, but, to Berliner’s misfortune, I started my public whining career in the Prussian capital. If you’ve occasionally laughed or curled your toes with embarrassing self-awareness at my gripes and complaints, I recommend you the book “Ich werde ein Berliner” by Wash Echte, the anonymous author behind the eponymous blog. With his characteristic sharp wit, Wash Echte cuts straight through Berlin’s hype and lays bare its new bohemia and their rites of passages. Often reading like an acerbic anthropology manual, nothing escapes the author’s unimpressed gaze: from club veterans, complicated relationships, counter-culture, creativity, to the omnipresent techno. Isn’t it just another book satirising hipsters? Well not really. First of all, the word “hipster” is avoided as a label. This is because hipsters are just the latest incarnation of the flâneur, the urban figure Walter Benjamin was already raving about at the turn of the last century. Benjamin grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Berlin and had a lifelong phobia of meaningful employment (he only considered joining the workforce as a secondhand book dealer funded by a loan from his father. His idea, not his father’s). Instead he spent much time in cafés refining his sauntering and lounging techniques after developing an admiration for substance-abusing tortured Parisian poets, all whilst griping about the shallowness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie. Sounds familiar? Then go to your nearest bookshop and pick up a copy of “Ich werde ein Berliner”.
A Year Onwards
I am the passenger and I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, the bright and hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight
So today I woke up nursing a hangover - not that this is unusual for a Sunday - and realised that on this date, a year ago, I arrived in Berlin. That’s all I’m able to muster really, because Berliner Kindl (filed under “acquired taste”, “beggars can’t be choosers” and the sadly overused “Why?”) really affects your ability to string coherent sentences together the following day. Some things are never a good idea. Like invading Russia in winter, declaring your ship unsinkable and letting Leonardo Dicaprio play an Irishman. Or mixing cheap beer with raspberry syrup to hide the flavour.
Anyway, so in honour of this anniversary I’m playing a Berlin soundtrack of sorts, something with depth and melody, a classic. In other words, no techno. Long before The Age of the Turntable, Berlin inspired many artists, like Iggy Pop, a passenger who rides through West Berlin in the 70s and finds himself full of lust for life.
Thanks for being such a wonderful host Berlin!
Containing Gentrification Banksy Style
So, apparently this anti-gentrification movement called Hedonism International is sending its members to view flats in Berlin’s most sought-after areas posing as would-be tenants. Once there, they strip off and prance around with only a Mickey Mouse mask to cover their identities, and with slogans such as “too expensive” or “rip off” painted on their birthday suits. Their stunt is often uploaded on Youtube the following morning.
Gentrification is a bit of a touchy issue in Berlin, to put it mildly, so I’m carefully going to side-step round it. But let me stress that I fully sympathise, nobody likes high property prices. I should know, I lived a decade in London. I’m however a tad semiotically confused…I mean what does Mickey Mouse has to do with high rents? Is there something else we don’t know about him (apart from a tendency to walk around in only pants?) Has he - unbeknownst to us - been dabbling in hedge fund management too? And more importantly, where are Donald Duck’s pants? Oooooh, it’s something to do with Capitalism, right? I always associate pant- wearing mice with unrealistic property prices. We should all thank Hedonism International for bringing so much nuance and insight to the gentrification debate. Such helpful tips! They have clearly taken a page out of Banksy’s book of guerilla protest. In case you didn’t know, Banksy smuggled a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner into Disney World. Hardcore! Not being a curator of hardcore myself and lacking Banksy’s tenous grasp of semiotics, I completely failed to see the link between Mickey Mouse and waterboarding. First torture, and now real estate speculation? Holy cheese what an evil rodent!
You know you’re in Prenzlauer Berg/Mitte…
When a loud bespectacled American enters the joint where you’re having lunch and asks very loudly whether they still have Pitfall, orders a Bionade (they don’t sell Club-Mate) and loudly proceeds to play it while you’re trying to eat your puerco especial. Retro games, you say? Wow! Edgy! Wasn’t wearing an Atari vintage t-shirt. Loser.
Defending the Germans
It is no coincidence - and a testament to the political importance of history in Germany- that both former West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and former East German boss Walter Ulbricht were self-appointed historians by profession.
Time Out Berlin Guide 2009 Edition
I’ve lived in Germany for almost a year now and this is only the second post in which I use the N-word, or Nazis as they call them round here. Germans have absolutely no qualms about mentioning the war - pick up any newspaper and chances are that you will come across a reference to WW2. Confronting history is a national pastime and the phenomenon has, true to Teutonic tradition, one of those unwieldy gobstoppers that I like to call übercompounds - Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Although I don’t know if I’m going to let that one into the übercompounds’ hall of headache, as it only consists, believe it or not, of two nouns - “Vergangenheit” (past) and “Bewältigung (translated here as “coming to terms with”). Anyway, there’s been much soul searching and handwringing - the harshest critics of Germany are the Germans themselves. Nobody is going to assuage their guilt, for the sole reason that they do not want to be forgiven. Although they would appreciate it if you occasionally refrained from bringing Hitler up, even if it is just in internet debates. They get it, you know. Many of them had to visit a former concentration camp as part of their curriculum. And yet Americans continue to be hung up on the war, maybe because this was the last conflict in which their involvement was, well, conflict free. Ditto for the UK, perhaps because this was the last time it was regarded as a world power, in the waning days of its Empire, before reluctantly handing over the baton to America.
Speaking of empires, no country that has ever had colonial ambitions (and they all have) comes clean out of this mudslinging contest. Nobody. Descending from the people of two former colonial powers, Spain and Denmark, I should have a pretty heavy cross to bear. Spain for culling or raping their way through a whole subcontinent (when not giving them smallpox or illnesses the native population had never been exposed to), Denmark for raping and pillaging their way through Europe, and later for colonising Greenland and turning the population into alcoholics. And making them learn Danish. At least we didn’t make them take up cricket! That’s just cruel.
Perhaps something similar will happen to WW2, and in a couple of centuries it will be just one more item in the extensive catalogue of human atrocities like the Great Leap Forward, the Scramble for Africa or the Dirty War. Fretting about Auschwitz didn’t stop the Killing Fields. Or Darfur.
So now that I’ve immersed us in a grand collective Mea Culpa, should Germany be exonerated? Of course not, nobody should. And that’s the point, we’re all in the same boat. Of course it’s essential to be reminded of the atrocities of which humanity is capable (and yes, these are still people - there are no mass murders, no monsters, just people committing the unspeakable). We do not want history to repeat itself despite doing so with more frequency than we’d wish. And yet we must be doing something right - there are less people dying in armed conflict since records began, despite the often misleading impression, thanks to technological developments, that remind us daily of conflicts we otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.
Again, my little rant is not going to stop the History Channel from being the Hitler Channel. I’ve yet to watch a documentary about the Weimar Republic; or German Romanticism (the German variety is known for valuing wit and humour as opposed to its more serious English counterpart); or Martin Luther and the rise of Protestantism, which would eventually funnily enough lead to secularism; or Karl Marx and the rise of social conscience; or that German scientist were great innovators and often recipients of the Nobel prize until the 30s. No, why expand our viewers’ horizons and dismantle prejudices when we can show a documentary about the role of donkeys under the Third Reich (I can’t find a source, but you’ll have to trust me on this one, was sober) Never mind that I’m about as personally responsible for ransacking the Aztec empire as Germans nowadays are for putting Jews on trains to Poland. For example, I was recently in Amsterdam where I found out that some locals still direct German tourists to the Anne Frank House when asked for directions to the nearest coffeeshop. Apparently they haven’t forgiven them yet for taking away their bikes under the WW2 occupation, as commemorated in the Dutch expression ‘okay, first return the bike’, which means ‘first things first’. Well, I’ve NEVER thought that I would agree with ANY National Socialist policy but I’m totally behind this one. In a similar vein, I suspect that this is the same reason Mussolini wanted the Italian trains to run on time after having, presumably, experienced first-hand Romans’ automotive skills. Amsterdammers should not been given back their bikes until they learn to distinguish between red and green (perhaps there’s a high Daltonism incidence amongst its inhabitants). So there you go, Nazis might have been responsible for genocide, kickstarting WW2 and causing the death of millions and the destruction of cities, asphyxiating the rich Weimar cultural scene, banning good taste (i.e. Bauhaus) and being the sole reason of existence for the History Channel. But they stood up to the Dutch cyclists!
No seriously, test your general knowledge…what do you know about Germany? How much do you know about its history that doesn’t involve swastikas? Or walls?
One of my favourite quotes…
“Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Woody Allen in Annie Hall (1977)
Ye Olde Amsterdam: The Capital of Daltonism
Fair burghers of Berlin! Harken to this humble harbinger! When people say that Berlin reminds them of NYC during the 80s, it might not *necessarily* be meant as a compliment. Well, I got your attention now, but don’t shoot the messenger and all that jazz. Anyway, I’m back in the Prussian capital after spending a few days swishing through the Schengen area - no passports, only euros - like the true (EU) international woman of mystery that I am. Apart from the part where I got seriously bovine bored at staring at cows for hours on end, as if I were forever trapped in a Milka advert. Or when we would stop for 10 minutes between borders to change engines and the entire crew to make it country appropriate, giving both crews the opportunity to pop out for a cigarette. This shit doesn’t happen to Jason Bourne! He hasn’t been to Amsterdam yet, because government-trained-killing machines pale in comparison to Dutch cyclists. They don’t call red “Amsterdam green” for nothing.
So I thought it would be a good location to celebrate my 10 year anniversary and recent engagement. That’s right, 10 years together. No, I don’t know what I put in his coffee, still trying to figure how I let this happen in the first place (incidentally, really hard to get a coffee in Amsterdam despite the profusion of these so-called “coffeeshops”, as Coleridge famously said before getting hit by a cyclist - Coffeehouses, coffeehouses everywhere, but not a drop to drink!). Anyway, a decade is not such a significant milestone, surviving Amsterdam is. Unbeknownst to us, there might be a large number of couples out there who also thought the Dutch capital would be a picturesque yet quirky avenue to celebrate their 10th anniversary, who are now pushing up daisies, Heineken bottles or whatever grows at the bottom of the canals after an unfortunate encounter with one these psychotic pedal pushers. Amsterdam Tourist Board, I’m implying NOTHING. But while you’re at it, could you perhaps change your logo from “Iamsterdam” to “I’llbeamsterdamned if don’t push that psychotic cyclist into the river” or something the natives can actually pronounce. You’re doing your citizens a a great disfavour. Dutch people speak English with such an effortless élan, better than many natives in fact. Yet their accent makes “Iamsterdam” come out more as an “I hamster am”, making them sound like an emancipated pet instead of a proud citizen of the prettiest European capital and all around lovely town.
Things I didn’t do in Amsterdam:
1) Go to a coffeshop
2) Queue at the Anne Frank House
3) Queue at the Van Gogh House
4) Navigate stag parties on a Saturday night at the Red Light District (Also, don’t Vegas girls get more for posing in their underwear?)
5) Push a psychotically smug cyclist in the river.
Things I did do in Amsterdam
1) Have a coffee
2) Go to the Rijksmuseum without having to queue
3) Go on a boat tour without having to queue
4) Go to the Red Light District during the day as part of a tour. Get reminded every 2 min how unbelievably liberal the Dutch are and how everything is so hunky dory in ye olde Amstedam, even among professional leg spreaders. Apparently the Dutch have the monopoly over liberalism just like the Dutch East India Company had the market locked down in other (equally liberal!) times by exploiting brown people in skirts and pirating Spanish ships (I’m over it!). The Dutch East India Company was, incidentally, not mentioned that often.
5) Regret not pushing a psychotically smug cyclist into the river.
The Berlin Integration Test!
So next month I’m doing this so-called “Orientierungskurs” as part of my language course. For those not plugged into the matrix that is the Volkshochschule (like any other institution, the Volkshochschule heavily favours green for all decorative purposes), an Orientierungskurs provides students with a grounding in German history and politics. The participants do not only become “oriented” but also integrated into German society. And apparently Danes are heavily encouraged to integrate (well our potatoes are different, and we have been known to open beer bottles with things that aren’t lighters. Like newspapers, or other bottles of beer). Actually I don’t know if the German government is particularly concerned about the accretion of Danish ghettos, as long as it doesn’t involve longships of course. I do, however, get half of my course fee reimbursed at the completion of the Orientierungskurs, so I assume that’s the gist of it.
Apparently there is now a greater sense of urgency to the Nationalist debate after a certain Thilo Sarrazin not only added fuel to the fire but, as far as I’m concerned, took a huge dump on it. Many people outside Germany are (blissfully) unaware of this gentleman, busy as they’re with their own homegrown racists, (and they don’t trust foreign ones anyway). Sarrazin is the author behind a book called “Why Germany is going to the dogs and it’s all the BROWN foreigners’ fault because they’re genetically more stupid and they’re dumbing down our once great nation”. Or something along these lines. It has been hard to avoid this self-proclaimed martyr to freedom of speech, given that he has been peddling his putrid pseudo-Darwinian “theories” with a healthy dose of rancid xenophobia on every single platform that would have him. And most of them would because, as far I’m concerned, there seems to some confusion between the right to be heard and the right to be listened to. Mr Sarrazin has the right to regurgitate his racist bile. I have the right to ignore him on the grounds that his arguments are more bereft of logic than a Tea Party convention. His arid field of prejudices is thirsty for logic! ( And yes, I know that I’m giving the guy press by refusing to give him press, but I’m just another tiny little star in the great constellation of internet whiners).
Yet I’m not a target of Sarrazin’s dubious proclamations on non-lederhosen wearing people (and word is that there are quite a few of those amongst “natives” too), despite doing an Orienterungskurs, because I’m white and middle class. HAH! In yer FACE, pseudo Darwinian arguments barely disguised as raging xenophobia! I would still like to integrate into my host country, even if my recent levels of beer consumption might be contributing to this alleged national dumbing down. I have therefore devised my own integration test! It’s still a work in progress but without further ado, here are some potential questions for my “Berlin test”:
You know you’re seamlessly blending into the capital without dramatically affecting general levels of stupidity when:
1) You view people who open beer bottles with an actual beer bottle opener with suspicion. That’s what cheap plastic lighters are for!
2) You have to ask other people for “Feuer” because you ruined your last cheap plastic lighter trying to open a beer bottle
3) You hand roll all your cigarettes and view filter cigarettes as an evil capitalist plot to deprive you of all the money you could spend on a significantly higher number of hand rolled cigarettes to which you’re by no means addicted, because everybody knows that only filter cigarettes are addictive because they’re capitalist.
4) You view hand-rolled cigarettes as an essential part of a healthy (but laid-back!) lifestyle.
5) You enthusiastically rave about Berlin’s “Multi-Kulti” which to you translates as “eating as many falafels/kebabs as possible when out in Kreuzberg”.
6) You always claim to have recently discovered Berlin’s best falafel/kebab that’s “like €2 because you would never pay €3 for one - that’s what inebriated backpackers do” - said backpackers clearly, unlike you, not self-appointed falafel guru and kebab connoisseurs.
7) You prematurely bemoan the sad demise of this cherished street grub establishment, knowing in your heart that it will soon become overflown with the great unwashed masses as word of mouth spreads that the best multicultural deep frier is to be found here, a rumour to which you by no means contributed. You know you’ll eventually have to pay €3 for those crispy chickpeas as the establishment’s popularity dramatically increases (something about supply and demand and the owners not necessarily wanting to be multicultural snack providers for life!!!!)
8) You think that 5am is a perfectly reasonable hour to go clubbing. You thus avoid rush hour at Berghain.
9) You can’t understand what those pedestrians are doing on the pavement - they’re getting in the way of your bike. Can’t they walk on the road or something?
10) You are so over Mauerpark fleamarket, which is not only a tourist trap but occasionally also seems suspiciously profitable. You still go the park though, because you want to catch the Sunday Karaoke, as you can’t beat its feel good factor, and also because you secretly want to sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (Ok, the last one might be just me, and it’s actually Blondie’s “Call Me”)
On Compounds
Some German words are so long that they have a perspective […] These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page, - and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in a museum.
The Awful German Language*, Mark Twain
I came across this word today:
Straßenverkehrsordnungsfwidrigkeitsverfahren
Something about traffic… its semantic dimension escaped me, as I was too busy trying to jot down all the letters in an intelligible sequence. Or so I’ve been told. I probably missed one anyway. I guess I could work out its meaning from scratch by separating all five components and reassembling again, but by the time I reach the fourth noun I’ve forgotten the three previous. I fall prey to morphological uncertainty and I’m no longer sure whether the noun consists of five parts or seven fish. German compounds stretch my short-term memory beyond the reasonable. I pity any goldfish wanting to take up this language. Although I’m sure that there are other sound reasons for this glaring lack of German among aquatic pets. Perhaps a tax on sandcastles…
Wo waren wir stehengeblieben? I seem to have lost the thread. Oh yes, compounds! Now, I do not have anything against this Teutonic penchant for soldering words together, but occasionally there must be a limit to this over-enthusiastic DIY coinage. If you’ve passed the three-noun threshold, you should perhaps consider pouring your thoughts into a “sentence” instead. You know, this universally-used structure with subject, verb and object - the daring might even add an indirect object to the mix (the Germans can’t get enough of indirect objects, because that gives them an excuse to wheel out the dative case and thus further perplex the unsuspecting Ausländer!). The humble sentence is a well-tested syntactically-sound platform that can support most human thoughts. You should give it a go! I’ve conducted many exhaustive - if not unwilling - tests and I’ve reached the conclusion that, by replacing these four-atom-word-compounds with sentences**, overall comprehension increases by 100% and compound induced migraines drop by 100%. We must put a halt to this compound malaise! If we don’t contain this promiscuous orgy of syllables soon, German will take over your Wernicke’s area and have a compound party! (Actually, that sounds like a riot.) German texts are already on average 30% longer than most of their counterparts; left unchecked they could easily double in size, and then there would no hope left for me or those poor goldfish.
* German speakers and Germanophiles, do not take umbrage. There is no need to get offended. I’m onto my fourth language and can assure you that all languages are equally awful. Otherwise they wouldn’t be worth learning.
** Should be used as part of a balanced syntactical diet. Anybody found replacing compounds by a myriad of never-ending subclauses in their writing will be repeatedly battered in the head with a copy of Noah Chomsky’s Syntactical Structures.
